The present invention relates to the design of a sequence control program used for the control of an apparatus and piping system which is constructed connecting the apparatus such as a valve and a tank with piping, and in particular, to a sequence design support system which supports so that its sequence design can be done efficiently.
For example, in a manufacturing equipment which is equipped with an apparatus and piping system which is constructed connecting the apparatus (process apparatus) such as a valve and a tank with piping, such as a medicine manufacture equipment, the flow path condition which is a condition in which a fluid such as an ingredient and a product or a wash liquid flows in its apparatus and piping system is supposed to be automatically controlled by the sequence control program. Such control in the apparatus and piping system is conducted as control of an operation of the apparatus such as an open and shut operation in the valve. For this reason, in the sequence design as a design of the sequence control program, it is general that the design of the sequence control program is conducted with plan data which describes the flow path condition per time step of the fluid in the apparatus and piping system (hereafter this plan data will be called a valve pattern plan) as original data. For example, a conventional representative example of such a sequence design is disclosed in a patent document 1.
The “sequence control program input device” of the patent document 1 is provided with a process flow chart generation part, a per scene sequence operation generation part, and a sequence control program generation part, and generates a process flow chart which shows arrangement relationship of the apparatus and a physical distribution path successively arranging the apparatus and the piping which are the objects of the control on a display screen in the process flow chart generation part, successively defines sequence control operations for that process flow chart and generates the physical distribution and apparatus operations in each scene of the sequence control operations in the per scene sequence operation generation part, and generates the sequence control program from those sequence control operations (the valve pattern plan) in the sequence control program generation part.